It may be marginally easier to hook into a new scheme into specific
browsers, but that doesn't make it good design. The monkey-surprise angle
shouldn't be forgotten either (is there anything on this around WAI User
Agent Guidelines?).
It's clear from the URI spec that it isn't the job of the scheme part to
handle this kind of operation. Whether or not a browser passes the URI is
down to the design of that browser, creating a new scheme is using a
sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Part of the cause of the problem is the desire to conflate the subscription
action into the handling of the content. I believe there is still work to do
on site description/manifests along the lines of RDDL around here. But given
that this problem only seems to have surfaced in the context of syndication,
the workaround of including the subscription URI in the feed would seem
reasonable for browsers that aren't amenable to mime-handling-dispatch
modification.
fyi 1, several of the existing RSS newsreaders include a http server running
locally on an obscure port, so it's possible to call the app and subscribe
in one operation by clicking on a link - see the icons here [1].
Note too that amongst the icons there, there's one that uses the
newsmonster-subscription: URI scheme!
fyi 2, this issue was discussed at length on the aggregators list a few
months ago [2].
Incidentally, the TAG might want to review its communications with
particular communities. Whether through ignorance or perceived irrelevance
of the W3C, this isn't the first mangling of specs to appear in the (RSS+)
syndication community (see Norm et al's recent discussions relating to
escaped HTML in XML). Probably won't be the last...
Cheers,
Danny.
[1] http://www.smoothwall.net/information/meta/feeds.html
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aggregators/message/396
-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
Luke Hutteman
Sent: 06 December 2003 08:29
To: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land
> It also
> looks like hooking a mime-type is easier than
> hooking into a new URI scheme, at least under
> Windows[1].
Actually, hooking a protocol is even easier in windows:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/networking/plugg
able/overview/appendix_a.asp
It also doesn't popup the "File Download" dialog or force you to download
the feed twice.
--Luke